70-534 – Skills to study

Well if you love Microsoft products as much as we do, and you wish to learn about them further and be recognised as one of the select few that are solution experts, well you will need to study, study and complete more study. There is nothing better than hands on experience combined with excellent articles and blogs to help you pass. First thing to do would be to sign up to Azure for a free account. Microsoft offers free $200 a month which should be more than enough to put what you learn in to practice. As always with Microsoft’s Azure, you are billed by the minute, so make sure to shutdown and deallocate anything you build to avoid using up your free credits. (You could also use our tool, the Azure Virtual Machine Scheduler to automate the shutdown, deallocate and power back on your VMs with a schedule you specify. You can download a free 30 day trial to test for yourself.)

If you are familiar with Microsoft exams, they are never easy. Be prepared to spend many nights reading books, watching videos and playing in your test Azure subscription to gain first hand experience. The following is taken from the Microsoft site for the required sections that you will need to study to pass the 70-534 exam, and I will cover off in future posts to help you with this.

Provide access to resources using identity providers, such as Microsoft account, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!; manage identity and access by using Azure Active Directory B2C

Identify an appropriate data security solution

Use the appropriate Access Control List (ACL), identify security requirements for data in transit and data at rest; identify, assess, and mitigate security risks by using Azure Operations Management Suite

Design a role-based access control strategy

Secure resource scopes, such as the ability to create VMs and Azure Web Apps

Connect to on-premises data from Azure applications using Service Bus Relay, Hybrid Connections, or the VPN capability of Websites, identify constraints for connectivity with VPN, identify options for joining VMs to domains or cloud services

Use a queue-centric pattern for development, select the appropriate storage for performance, identify storage options for cloud services and hybrid scenarios with compute on-premises and storage on Azure, differentiate between cloud services and VMs interacting with storage service and SQL Database

Design a management, monitoring, and business continuity strategy (15-20%)

Evaluate hybrid and Azure-hosted architectures for Microsoft System Center deployment

Understand, at an architectural level, which components are supported in Azure; describe design considerations for managing Azure resources with System Center; understand which scenarios would dictate a hybrid scenario

Design a monitoring strategy

Identify the Microsoft products and services for monitoring Azure solutions; understand the capabilities of System Center for monitoring an Azure solution; understand built-in Azure capabilities; identify third-party monitoring tools, including open source; describe use cases for Operations Manager, Global Service Monitor, and Application Insights; describe the use cases for Windows Software Update Services (WSUS), Configuration Manager, and custom solutions; describe the Azure architecture constructs, such as availability sets and update domains, and how they impact a patching strategy; analyze logs by using the Azure Operations Management Suite

Understand the architectural capabilities of BC/DR, describe Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery (ASR), describe use cases for Hyper-V Replica and ASR; use Azure Backup to back up ARM VMs

Design a disaster recovery strategy

Design and deploy Azure Backup and other Microsoft backup solutions for Azure, understand use cases when StorSimple and System Center Data Protection Manager would be appropriate, design and deploy Azure Site recovery

Design Azure Automation and PowerShell workflows

Create a PowerShell script specific to Azure, automate tasks by using the Azure Operations Management Suite

Describe the use cases for Azure Automation configuration

Understand when to use Azure Automation, Chef, Puppet, PowerShell, or Desired State Configuration (DSC)